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Comment by scottndecker | Hacker News Reader

Last I checked, it was a significant pain in the butt to get an API key from Instagram, specifically because they didn't want you doing this sort of thing. Anyone know how he got access to the Instagram API? I've played around with similar methods but ended up using selenium because of the API restrictions of IG

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It's fairly trivial to get the credentials out of the Instagram app and use the private API the official app uses. As long as you're not being dumb about it like sending a cURL user agent or something, it's fairly hard for Instagram to prevent.

None of this requires an API. You can scrape the web version of IG and obtain everything OP claims.

https://www.instagram.com/developer/

It looks like it won't matter soon.

>These capabilities will be disabled immediately (previously set for July 31, 2018 or December 11, 2018 deprecation). The following will be deprecated according to the timeline we shared previously:

>Public Content - all remaining capabilities to read public media on a user's behalf on December 11, 2018

>Basic - to read a user’s own profile info and media in early 2020

It's past December 11th 2018, so some workaround/hack is being used for this workflow.

Yeah I know...I was refering to the 2020 one. In less than a year you won't be able to read your own profile's media or info. It's going to make lots of things difficult I imagine.

https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python

That repo doesn't let you do 100% of the things the OP claimed to do. (e.g. DM automation)

It's got pending PRs that permit DMs. https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python/pull/322/fi...

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